pdfreaders campaign
Sam Geeraerts
samgee at fsfe.org
Tue Jul 12 23:27:39 CEST 2011
Martijn Brekhof wrote:
> Ik zou het woord "onvrij" vervangen door "niet vrij". Onvrij wordt bij mij
> weten in NL nauwelijks gebruikt.
Personally, I always say "niet-vrij" (see also Dutch language guideline
6.I [1]). I considered "onvrij", but for some reason it always makes me
think of doublespeak. And I think "niet-vrij" just says "the opposite of
free (as in freedom)" more clearly. It still sounds kind of awkward, but
that's Dutch for ya.
Which brings me to a pet peeve of mine: a translation to Dutch should
be, well, Dutch. The text's vocabulary is good, but "PDF reader" sticks
out like a sore thumb. Wikipedia has a category "PDF-lezer" [2], a term
that is simple, obvious and covers the load. "PDF-weergever" is more
accurate, as it can hardly be confused with a person or a text-to-speech
tool, but it sounds more forced.
Apart from these details, I think that the letter is certainly usable,
but I agree with others here that the style could do with some
improvement. The rather literal translation is a bit forced and it
sounds harsher than the English text to me. As spa8blauw says, it makes
sense to put the emphasis more on how to make things better than to
point a finger.
I think most people aren't aware that there is something else than Adobe
Reader (many aren't even aware that they're using a dedicated program to
open PDF files). A lot of government websites are probably made or
maintained by a technical person (at least the structural part including
the PDF notice), but we can't assume we're always talking to a computer
literate. Sometimes the direct contact person is "the content guy", who
just forwards it to the maintaining web developer. If he cares enough to
click that button in his mail client, that is. Or perhaps the website is
maintained by that colleague who said he read a computer magazine once.
So I think the first thing to make clear is that there is more than one
program to open these files and that that choice is beneficial for everyone.
Secondly, we want to explain the advantages and importance of free
software, because that's what we care about. Following that by subtly
pointing out that linking straight to Adobe Reader is not a great idea
(e.g. rephrasing "it's free advertising, making you Adobe's puppet").
Ideally, we'd steer them to realizing that they've been horribly wrong
all this time, without actually telling them in so many words. It works
best if they convince themselves [3].
Third point: if we're to suggest that they put a link to pdfreaders.org
then they need to be confident that it's not going to be a dead link in
a few months time. When dealing with questions from website visitors, a
link to good ol' Adobe seems like a safer bet than one to a campaign
website from a organization you never heard of, which on top of that
faces users with a choice.
Then, we thank them for their attention and effort and we offer support
regarding the issue.
Now all we need is a masterfully skilled writer to pour all this into a
few short fluent paragraphs. :)
[1] http://woordenlijst.org/leidraad/6/3/#r6i
[2] http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorie:PDF-lezer
[3] Just to be clear: I'm not sitting in a high desk chair stroking a
white cat here. :)
mvg,
Sam Geeraerts
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